Nine top stories about mother-son relationships

Keisha Bush was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts. She received her MFA in creative writing from The New School, where she was a Riggio Honors Teaching Fellow and recipient of an NSPE Dean’s Scholarship. After a career in corporate finance and international development that brought her to live in Dakar, Senegal, she decided to focus full-time on her writing. She lives in East Harlem.

Bush's new novel is No Heaven For Good Boys.

[My Book, The Movie: No Heaven for Good Boys; The Page 69 Test: No Heaven for Good Boys]

At Electric Lit she tagged nine "books, movies, and albums on the bond between boys and their moms," including:

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

This novel, structured as a son’s letter to his mother, pulls the reader headfirst into the complicated experience of coming of age with a broken parent. Vuong explores how generational trauma and pain—in this case, the Vietnam War—are handed down from parent to child. The experiences of his mother become his own, so much so that he cannot say where the wounds of his mother’s body end and the wounds of his own begin.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue